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New-Age Parenting Culture Invades the NFL
With the Super Bowl just days away, the media is obsessing over Marshawn Lynch, the Seattle Seahawks running back who has accrued over $100,000 in fines by the NFL for his unwillingness to talk to the...
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Examining White People
Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny by Mark Sandiford, National Film Board of Canada I just watched a great film, Qallunaat! Why White People are Funny, an anthropological study of White people...
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The Death of Free Speech
(Warning: The above video depicts or describes the murder of several individuals, including children.) The recent shooting in Copenhagen, like most terrorist acts, was reprehensible, unforgivable,...
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Robert Durst: Jinxed by Viral Media
I just finished watching the last episode of HBO’s The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, only to find out that Durst was arrested yesterday in connection with the 2000 murder of Susan Berman....
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Why Baltimore? Why arson?
It’s no secret that police in the U.S. are killing people at an alarming rate–more than one per day for the past 15 years. Police killings, particularly ones caught on tape, and especially the...
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Secretive, but not Secret
In 2012, one of my best friends from college, Angel Perez, was illegally detained by members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), taken to their ‘black site’ in Homan Square, and sexually assaulted...
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Louie C.K. and the Virtues of Realism
On the hit show Louie, aside from a token, comedic clip of fantasy in each episode, realism rules the roost. Louie C.K.’s dedication to portraying the struggles of a single-father and stand-up...
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How does the good become good?
Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these...
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The Dangers of Prosecutorial Tunnel Vision
Last week, Dahlia Lithwick posted a story on Slate.com about Mark Weiner, a man convicted of abducting a young woman in Charlottesville, VA in 2012. Lithwick offers some background: The story began on...
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Kingsley Amis Human Behavior
(1) About two hundred pages into Kingsley Amis’s well-known and still wonderful comic novel Lucky Jim there is a paragraph that seems to rise above the rest, to take the novel’s vision of human...
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Donald Trump the Fascist?
Seemingly every statement regarding Donald Trump in recent weeks either explicitly or implicitly compares him to Hitler. It’s almost as though both social and mainstream media are trying to pay homage...
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Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude
Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the...
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Identity, Erikson, and the Third Phase of Life
I remember in the ’60s being fascinated by the writing of Erik Erikson. I’m not sure if he’s read much today. But there I was last week in the quiet of my new home, Portland, Maine, in the quiet of...
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Holocaust, Son of Saul, Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard appears unexpectedly on the “Opinionator” page of last week’s New York Times. He’s discussed in “The Stone” by a canny and sensitive philosopher, Katalin Balog. She finds the Danish...
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Technology in the Age of Inequality
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the...
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Privacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
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CIA, Obstruction of Justice, 9/11
The only good thing that came out of 9/11 was that the building fell on him. –Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA anti-bin Laden task force, testifying before a congressional committee,...
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In Search of Prosecutorial Ethics
I am reading about legal news out of North Carolina, but perhaps not the legal news you’re expecting. Rather, I am reading Radley Balko’s Washington Post blog in which he discusses a proposed rule for...
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Louie C.K. and the Virtues of Realism
On the hit show Louie, aside from a token, comedic clip of fantasy in each episode, realism rules the roost. Louie C.K.’s dedication to portraying the struggles of a single-father and stand-up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How does the good become good?
Two disparate analogies to help us begin thinking about how the process works. A drug company tests its latest concoctions—e.g. statins—to see what effects they have. Discovering something one of these...
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